Group discusses flooding preparation in West Ashley

A national group met with community members in West Ashley Tuesday evening to better understand how the area is affected by flooding, just one week to the year that flood water devastated South Carolina.

The ResilientAmerica program of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine hopes to find the hardest hit areas and help people prepare for future flooding.

Charleston is ResilientAmerica’s news community after deciding it had the demographic requirements and also the potential for heavy flooding. Danielle Nagele with the national company said the group has one goal in mind, “To help build resilience and community resilience really, but also floods specifically in this area. And by resilience I mean every aspect of dealing with a flood, from mitigating it so it doesn’t happen at all, preparing for it so individual families can better respond, all the way to recovering and making that recovery as quickly as possible.”

The groups purpose is to gather data and then later facilitate that information that could result in positive changes for the community.

“We’re hoping to gather data and summarize the data and analyze it and work with organizations and stakeholders in Charleston county to see where they can be some impacts where can we help facilitate some activities or solutions,” Nagele said.

West Ashley homeowners said flooding is a major issue, especially in the Shadow Moss community.

“We’ve reached out to people in Charleston and asked them about what possible solutions are for storm water. Certainly we would hope that they would be sympathetic to the situation but we’ve not gotten a lot of good response or help from those sources that we’ve reached out too,” Daniel Smoak said.

He also said his lawn and neighborhood see flooding with heavy rainfall.

“Every time the forecast calls for a lot of water we get nervous because it comes up in the yard,” Smoak said.

The group is hoping to have all of its data gathered by January, then they can engage in facilitating change.